crispycritter's Reviews (516)

Just finished book 3 a couple minutes ago and still collecting my thoughts. The primary one being - what was the point of all that?

I think this is the book Jordan Peterson must have been thinking of when he talked about subpar women dreaming of alien pirate creatures. Absolutely excellent monster romance. No notes. 

I'm convinced Kresley Cole is just one of my blind spot authors. Was there an uncomfortable amount of vivisection in this book and little to no grovel? Yeah. Did I still freaking love it? Yeah. Was it basically the past 3-4 books recyled? Maybe you should mind your own business. 

One of the coziest HRs I've ever read with a distractingly passive authorial voice - this book almost did not keep my attention and I wanted to DNF at parts. It's probably ok to have sentences like "her lips were kissed" instead of "guy kissed gal," but not for the whole book. I'm sure this is fine for other folks. For me personally, it severely impacted my initial comprehension and meant I needed to re-read sentences. It also made a lot of what was happening feel less impactful.

The good news is I learned what the word calliphygian means, and it's basically an old school word for saying DAT ASS. The more you know.

This started out as a really sweet book but I am just having a tough time with the prose. A lot of the feelings in this book were described “bombastically,” to quote a well known romance reviewer. And that’s usually ok - after all, romance can be a little over the top. I like big feelings. But we got big feelings that were immediately followed up with “and this is what this means and why it’s important.” As a reader, I didn’t feel like I was given an opportunity to feel those feelings alongside Opal and Pepper, I was just kind of beaten with them and lectured on their significance.  And it got tiring and sucked a lot of the joy out of my reading experience - discovering the significance of stolen glances and grazes of hands via a gently guided narrator. 

TL;DR an unfortunate amount of showing not telling. And I'm gonna rant a bit - not about this book specifically, but I gotta put this somewhere. Other smarter people have articulated this before, but I think this is a trend in modern fiction of all genres where authors don't trust their readers to draw the "right" conclusion about what's transpiring within the pages. We don't have themes anymore, we have small theses an author writes mini dissertations on. Part of the joy of reading is layering on my own interpretation of what's happening, based on my lived experience. If there's no room for me to do this, what's the point? Petition to reign in the overly didactic hand-holding and just let readers love AND HATE things, fairly or unfairly. This style of writing is like putting a restrictive covenant on land you sell, so that future generations can't freely decide what to do with it long after you're gone. Once you put your book out into the world it doesn't belong to you anymore, you gotta let it go and let people freely interpret it, not bake in an oppressive narrative voice which demands a single, correct reading experience.

Major props to the neurodivergent character rep. As a ND reader, Opal and Pepper felt incredibly authentic and I deeply related to both of them. Lovely lovely characters.

Major props to the flower farm / gardening research - as someone who loves gardening, this might be THE first book where someone knows what season rununculi bloom, etc etc. I remember reading another book where a character planted seeds in the dead of winter for a plant that would have most certainly been an annual in that region and just screeching in annoyance.

It’s just . . . Not good. I can turn my brain off and read pretty mindless books but this unfortunately did not pass minimum viability. Also the two authors really do not come off as girl’s girls. Avery is *John Ralfio voice* the wooooooooorst. Why? Because conflict. Juniper June’s reason for keeping her relationship with Beau a secret - her best friend since childhood Avery could not possibly be ok with her brother dating her best friend because that thought is “simple” but “in the female mind, it’s more complicated than that.” This drivel? In 2024? C’mon. Enough of these stereotypes. 

One of the most validating and kind books I've ever read. I was not prepared for how much a book on cleaning my house would make me cry. This is essential reading for anyone who is neurodivergent, struggling with their mental health, or just in a tough season of life.

I'm sad about this DNF. A book with a ton of promise that just felt like it was written for me - but turned out to be a poorly recylced Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries. Super wimsical on the surface and yet an overwhelmingly dense, sluggish reading experience? So dense the characters got lost in the excessive bird puns and silliness. I love bird puns, whimsy, and silliness in my books - but this just did not work for me. Frustrated with how I kept losing interest and it looks like a lot of other negative reviews feel the same way. Almost an excellent book with something indescribable missing.